May 1, 2017

Meet Dr Lyuda Tavolzhanskaya & Vivek Kinra of VIP Dental Lounge in Portage Park

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr Lyuda Tavolzhanskaya & Vivek Kinra.

Vivek, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My wife, Dr Lyuda Tavolzhanskaya is a practicing dentist with over 10 years of experience practicing in Chicago. She’s been wanting to start her own dental practice so eventually we made the plunge. However, when we started, I set about a goal to build the best dental practice in Chicago as viewed from the ‘eyes of a patient’. We set that as our 3 year goal. What that means is that we want to be judged as the best by the patients. As you can imagine, winning over patients going to a dentist is no easy feat as it’s not like going to a restaurant that they enjoy and looking forward to it. So in order to become the best, we did a lot of things that no other dental office does-that is, we built the office like a cafe plus an art gallery. In order to be able to do that, we bought the real estate so we can demo and rebuild the way we wanted it. Instead of buying a dental practice (which is what most dentists going into private practice do), we started from scratch with no patients. Our belief was that if we build the best office, patients will find us and choose us.

To design the office, we did not hire a dental office designer or a dental office construction company. Instead, I chose to design it for myself. I’m a patient of my wife as well in her old dental office and I am super finicky. As a result, I believed that if I designed the office for myself, we will cover all bases. While designing, I started noting all the things patients hate at the dental office and how we can make that experience better. From that, I designed what I called the Perfect Patient Experience. This entails giving the patients the best experience they can get. So instead of a waiting area, we created a lounge with floor to ceiling glass walls to give a feeling of openness so they don’t feel cramped. Each patient chair got an iPad with noise cancellation headphones. We bought a one touch gourmet coffee machine that can make latte macchiato, cafe lattes, espressos etc. We even built our own iPad app (I’m an application developer) that the patients can use to order the cappuccinos from. On the same iPad app, patients can watch their fav movies from Netflix, play games, etc. Additionally, we added a photo booth with a lot of funny masks etc. for kids. Kids that come to us essentially forget that they are at a dental office as we see them walking around with these masks, posting pics on Facebook, and playing kids games or watching cartoons. We’ve had a lot of kids ask their parents to want to come to our office. Other than this, removed all the paperwork filing at the office. Instead, we went 100% paperless. Patients simply get a link on their phone via text and enter all their info directly on their smartphones which automatically comes and feeds directly into our systems. The other things I always wanted to be able to do as a patient myself is be able to communicate directly with the doctor. So we got a service that allows patients to text our main office number that goes to the doctor. This way, the doctor and the patient can communicate securely and they don’t need to know a different number. This is just one of numerous steps we took towards the perfect patient experience that I’ll be happy to go over in further detail!

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
No startup is smooth. We tried to take on way too much by completely redefining the experience. Part of the struggle was to find people who embraced our goal as that meant doing a LOT of things that other dental offices don’t do. So finding top quality staff was always an issue as most people came from a typical dental office that doesn’t place customer service at the top. Getting new staff members to embrace our methods was the biggest issue we faced. The other challenges were that we grew too quickly. We ended up adding days and new doctors and the fast growth came at the expense of our mission statement. As a result, now we’re dialing back to make sure each patient gets the care and comfort that we had envisioned.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
We are a general/family dentist. We perform all types of dental services such as – dental crowns, veneers, teeth whitening, dental implant, dentures, invisalign, cosmetic bondings, metal free fillings, extractions, etc. We are best known for what we call artistic crowns and veneers. Dr Lyuda is super passionate about her crowns and veneers and her goal with any crown on a visible tooth is to make it so natural that other dentists can’t pick the crown either. To do that, we do not use the standard labs or machined crowns; instead we send to a local boutique lab that is around 3x more expensive for us but they specialize in meticulously adding the natural variations in a tooth like translucency, slight grey ness at the bottom etc. Our crowns are so natural looking that we run contests online that if someone can pick the crown from the pic of a patient we placed an artistic crown on, they get free exam, x-rays, consultation, and advanced oral cancer screening. The other specialty we have is teeth-whitening. I personally wanted to get the best teeth whitening product other there as I believe that teeth whitening is an instant boost to anyone’s self-confidence and esteem. So we invested in the most premium product out there and we do a 2 week whitening program that often even we are surprised with the results!

What were you like growing up?
Shy, introverted, inquisitive

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